Proceedings of the ECSCW'95 Workshop on the Role of Version Control in CSCW Applications

The workshop entitled "The Role of Version Control in Computer Supported Cooperative Work Applications" was held on September 10, 1995 in Stockholm, Sweden in conjunction with the ECSCW'95 conference. Version control, the ability to manage relationships between successive instances of artifacts, organize those instances into meaningful structures, and support navigation and other operations on those structures, is an important problem in CSCW applications. It has long been recognized as a critical issue for inherently cooperative tasks such as software engineering, technical documentation, and authoring. The primary challenge for versioning in these areas is to support opportunistic, open-ended design processes requiring the preservation of historical perspectives in the design process, the reuse of previous designs, and the exploitation of alternative designs. The primary goal of this workshop was to bring together a diverse group of individuals interested in examining the role of versioning in Computer Supported Cooperative Work. Participation was encouraged from members of the research community currently investigating the versioning process in CSCW as well as application designers and developers who are familiar with the real-world requirements for versioning in CSCW. Both groups were represented at the workshop resulting in an exchange of ideas and information that helped to familiarize developers with the most recent research results in the area, and to provide researchers with an updated view of the needs and challenges faced by application developers. In preparing for this workshop, the organizers were able to build upon the results of their previous one entitled "The Workshop on Versioning in Hypertext" held in conjunction with the ECHT'94 conference. The following section of this report contains a summary in which the workshop organizers report the major results of the workshop. The summary is followed by a section that contains the position papers that were accepted to the workshop. The position papers provide more detailed information describing recent research efforts of the workshop participants as well as current challenges that are being encountered in the development of CSCW applications. A list of workshop participants is provided at the end of the report. The organizers would like to thank all of the participants for their contributions which were, of course, vital to the success of the workshop. We would also like to thank the ECSCW'95 conference organizers for providing a forum in which this workshop was possible

Symmetric Synchronous Collaborative Navigation

Synchronous collaborative navigation is a form of social navigation where users virtually share a web browser. In this paper, we present a symmetric, proxy-based architecture where each user can take the lead and guide others in visiting web sites, without the need for a special browser or other software. We show how we have applied this scheme to a problem-solving-oriented e-learning system

Tabulator Redux: writing Into the Semantic Web

A first category of Semantic Web browsers were designed to present a given dataset (an RDF graph) for perusal, in various forms. These include mSpace, Exhibit, and to a certain extent Haystack. A second category tackled mechanisms and display issues around linked data gathered on the fly. These include Tabulator, Oink, Disco, Open Link Software's Data Browser, and Object Browser. The challenge of once that data is gathered, how might it be edited, extended and annotated has so far been left largely unaddressed. This is not surprising: there are a number of steep challenges for determining how to support editing information in the open web of linked data. These include the representation of both the web of documents and the web of things, and the relationships between them; ensuring the user is aware of and has control over the social context such as licensing and privacy of data being entered, and, on a web in which anyone can say anything about anything, helping the user intuitively select the things which they actually wish to see in a given situation. There is also the view update problem: the difficulty of reflecting user edits back through functions used to map web data to a screen presentation. In the latest version of the Tabulator project, described in this paper we have focused on providing the write side of the readable/writable web. Our approach has been to allow modification and addition of information naturally within the browsing interface, and to relay changes to the server triple by triple for least possible brittleness (there is no explicit 'save' operation). Challenges which remain include the propagation of changes by collaborators back to the interface to create a shared editing system. To support writing across (semantic) Web resources, our work has contributed several technologies, including a HTTP/SPARQL/Update-based protocol between an editor (or other system) and incrementally editable resources stored in an open source, world-writable 'data wiki'. This begins enabling the writable Semantic Web

The future of enterprise groupware applications

This paper provides a review of groupware technology and products. The purpose of this review is to investigate the appropriateness of current groupware technology as the basis for future enterprise systems and evaluate its role in realising, the currently emerging, Virtual Enterprise model for business organisation. It also identifies in which way current technological phenomena will transform groupware technology and will drive the development of the enterprise systems of the future

Factors shaping the evolution of electronic documentation systems

The main goal is to prepare the space station technical and managerial structure for likely changes in the creation, capture, transfer, and utilization of knowledge. By anticipating advances, the design of Space Station Project (SSP) information systems can be tailored to facilitate a progression of increasingly sophisticated strategies as the space station evolves. Future generations of advanced information systems will use increases in power to deliver environmentally meaningful, contextually targeted, interconnected data (knowledge). The concept of a Knowledge Base Management System is emerging when the problem is focused on how information systems can perform such a conversion of raw data. Such a system would include traditional management functions for large space databases. Added artificial intelligence features might encompass co-existing knowledge representation schemes; effective control structures for deductive, plausible, and inductive reasoning; means for knowledge acquisition, refinement, and validation; explanation facilities; and dynamic human intervention. The major areas covered include: alternative knowledge representation approaches; advanced user interface capabilities; computer-supported cooperative work; the evolution of information system hardware; standardization, compatibility, and connectivity; and organizational impacts of information intensive environments

Hypermedia and the semantic web: a research agenda

Until recently, the Semantic Web was little more than a name for the next generation Web infrastructure as envisioned by its inventor, Tim Berners-Lee. Now, with the introduction of XML and RDF, and new developments such as RDF Schema and DAML+OIL, the Semantic Web is rapidly taking shape. In this paper, we first give an overview of the state-of-the-art in Semantic Web technology, the key relationships with traditional hypermedia research, and a comprehensive reference list to various sets of literature (Hypertext, Web and Semantic Web). The core of the paper presents a research agenda b

An analysis framework for CSCW systems

Software toolkits are under development to help construct applications that support group-working. Toolkit developers adopt different approaches to group-work support in order to tackle different issues and a toolkit is commonly characterised by the approach adopted. It is difficult to compare toolkits because of this lack of apparent commonality and it is difficult to decide which toolkits meet specific application requirements. [Continues.

Toward An Architecture for Internet-based \u27Evolutionary\u27 Collaboration

In this paper, we review, synthesize and extend the World Wide Web (WWW) models for collaboration into a meta-framework. We start with a set of requirements for a framework for collaborative systems and describe a specific architectural implementation of the suggested framework for Internet based collaboration building upon current research efforts worldwide. Areas that need further research and our future plans are describe